Andrew Kirmse's Home Page

TI-Runner Editor, a level editor for a Loderunner-like game that I reverse engineered. This sold a few copies in 1987 before the TI/99-4A went under.

The arcade game emulator MAME, for which I did some work on the Windows UI.

Meridian 59, the first 3D MMO. I created this with my brother Chris in 1994, and it was published in 1996.

My master's thesis was implementing the two-phase commit for Thor, an object-oriented database, in Barbara Liskov's group at MIT in 1995.

I built some nice multiplayer networking libraries for the Sega Dreamcast that unfortunately never saw the light of day.

Star Wars: Starfighter, a million-selling space combat game for the Playstation 2 and Xbox (2001). I wrote the graphics, animation and collision detection systems, and snuck in a multiplayer mode as an Easter egg.

Game Programming Gems, a series of books on game programming. I contributed to the first 4 volumes and was the editor of Game Programming Gems 4.

Google Desktop (2004).

Google Maps. I helped launch Maps in 2005.

Google Earth. Engineering director in 2010.

Google Maps for Mobile. Engineering director in 2011.

Google Now. I co-created Google Now and recruited and led the engineering team. It launched in 2012.

Peakbagger, an Android app for tracking mountain climbs, which I wrote in 2014. I released an iOS version in 2015.

I ran an analysis of U.S. terrain data and found 10 new county high points. Here is a KML file with the full results.

I ran an analysis of global terrain data to compute the true isolation of every mountain in the world. A description is here.

After mountain prominence researcher Edward Earl's death in 2015, I helped to restore his WinProm program to a usable state. I later computed the prominence of every mountain in the world here, and wrote a journal article here.